By Elizabeth Bevilacqua.
When you leaned in for the briefest hug—one arm, no chest—I fell sick with desire, pangs of longing. You in the backyard, you against the truck, you with the frayed sleeves, you with the canvas jacket, scruffy you, rough around the edges you, funny sharp quick you, you with the shoulders, you with the hands, you on the phone, you smoking a cigarette, you with an arm on the steering wheel, you spilling a few drops of soda on the ground, you with the Carhartts and Camels and raspy voice and me losing my mind.
Can I take you between some warp and weft of time? Some suspended space separated from consequence? You with the coltish energy. You with a quality that makes me want to hold onto your sleeve at all times, partly to guide you, partly to touch you, partly to keep you safe, partly to be dragged along by you, partly not to lose you, partly to have you close. You, always moving, moving, moving. I am plagued by what I can and cannot say, should or should not do. A strange grief for a thing I never had.
I’ve held myself rigidly. Vigilant. I was beginning to trust that I had some goodness inside me when you set into motion some celestial thrum.
You are just beginning to truly assemble yourself. All this disparate energy you’re gathering up, wrangling and arranging, is only beginning to cohere. I want to witness this transformation. I want to see what you will be like in ten years, twenty, thirty. You have a very good heart, and for that, I want you to have everything you want.
There was a flicker. I saw it once in you. Half a thought, half a question, a gesture, a testing. All of this with you, it doesn’t feel like a decision. It feels like something we are in the path of. Some force moving down the road and we are standing in the street. Big blocks of light waning through the windows, falling across the couch. The curtains pushed far to the sides, glowing. Cracks in the plaster like river tributaries. Me following them, branch to branch to branch, headed for the sea.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Elizabeth Bevilacqua’s fiction, poems, and essays have appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Rumpus, Slice, Monkeybicycle, Juked, Bodega, and elsewhere. She won the Glenna Luschei Award from Prairie Schooner for her essay ‘Cycles’ and her work was a top 10 Finalist in the ScreenCraft cinematic book competition. She received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Florida and lives in Western Massachusetts.
